Better Living Through Fast Food & Statins

Only some egghead scientists could think this was a good idea! As reported by AFP:

Fast food restaurants could hand out free cholesterol-busting statin drugs with their burgers and fries so customers can offset the heart disease risks caused by the food, researchers said.

Statins lower the amount of unhealthy “LDL” cholesterol in the blood, and a raft of data has shown they are highly effective in fighting the risk of a heart attack.

Scientists at Imperial College London said this week that taking a statin pill could offset the increased risk to the heart caused by the fat in a medium-sized cheeseburger and a small milkshake.

Dr Darrel Francis, from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London, said: “Statins don’t cut out all of the unhealthy effects of burgers and fries. It’s better to avoid fatty food altogether.”

“But we’ve worked out that in terms of your likelihood of having a heart attack, taking a statin can reduce your risk to more or less the same degree as a fast food meal increases it.”

The researchers argued the proposal was no different to asking people to wear seatbelts because of the increased risks to health when driving a car…

“In postmodern discourse, truth is rejected explicitly and consistencycan be a rare phenomenon. Consider the following pairs of claims.* On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand,postmodernism tells it like it really is.* On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving ofrespect; on the other, Western culture is uniquelydestructive and bad.* Values are subjective—but sexism and racism are reallyevil.* Technology is bad and destructive—and it is unfair thatsome people have more technology than others.* Tolerance is good and dominance is bad—but whenpostmodernists come to power, political correctnessfollows.There is a common pattern here: Subjectivism and relativism in onebreath, dogmatic absolutism in the next. Postmodernists are wellaware of the contradictions—especially since their opponents relishpointing them out at every opportunity. And of course a postmodernistcan respond dismissingly by citing Hegel—‚Those aremerely Aristotelian logical contradictions‛—but it is one thing tosay that and quite another to sustain Hegelian contradictionspsychologically.”